Book Image

VMware vSphere 5.5 Cookbook

By : Abhilash G B
Book Image

VMware vSphere 5.5 Cookbook

By: Abhilash G B

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (22 chapters)
VMware vSphere 5.5 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Expanding/growing a VMFS datastore


It is likely that you would run out of free space on a VMFS volume over time as you end up deploying more and more VMs on it, especially in a growing environment. Fortunately, accommodating additional free space on a VMFS volume is possible. However, this requires that the LUN either has free space left on it or it has been expanded/resized in the storage array.

The procedure to resize/expand the LUN in the storage array differs from vendor to vendor, and as this is beyond the scope of this book, we assume that the LUN either has free space on it or has already been expanded.

The following flowchart provides a high-level overview of the procedure:

How to do it...

We can expand a VMFS datastore using two methods:

  • Using the Increase Datastore Capacity wizard

  • Using the ESXi CLI tool vmkfstools

Before attempting to grow the VMFS datastore, issue a rescan on the HBAs to ensure that the ESXi sees the increased size of the LUN.

Also, make note of the NAA ID, LUN number...